Last September, @tomcritchlow proposed a federated, decentralized "web of books" as an alternative to Goodreads, the monopoly platform of booklists owned by the monopoly platform of bookselling.
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Now, he's elaborated on the idea in a post with a lot more technical detail about how to build an extensible system for allowing friends, fans, and strangers to exchange booklists, reviews, and recommendations.
tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/lib…
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tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/lib…
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Critchlow wants an "RSS-like" mechanism to tie it all together. But @genmon makes a convincing case that RSS can do it all:
interconnected.org/home/2020/04/1…
I love this stuff.
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interconnected.org/home/2020/04/1…
I love this stuff.
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Also: Goodreads was a perfectly cromulent standalone service that was gobbled up by Amazon as part of its acquisitions strategy of establishing massive vertical monopolies, and that this was only legal because we've been nerfing antitrust for 40 years.
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Big Tech critics often indulge in the same tech exceptionalism that they (rightfully) condemn tech leaders for, insisting that Big Tech got big because of "network effects" and "first mover advantage" (which, ofc, is why we all search Altavista with our Crays all day long).
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When you look closely, you see tech's growth strategy is the utterly unexceptional playbook that dates back to Rockefeller, Carnegie and Mellon: buying (and killing) nascent competitors, merging with major competitors, and using vertical monopolies to control prices.
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By the same token, tech leaders aren't 100-foot-tall supergeniuses. They are completely ordinary mediocrities, no better than you or me, with howling voids where their consciences should be.
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